Muckbeast

If you aren’t reading The Psychology of Video Games blog yet you are missing out. Between that site and a few other blog posts I’ve read recently (like Wolfshead’s lament about WoW’s Growing Immersion Deficit) I was motivated to write an article about designing group contest events in MMOs. This is just a small part of my general belief that MMO developers right now focus entirely too much on static content and not enough on all the potential fun things that can happen in a virtual world or an online community.

Engaging Players – Desgining Group Contests for your MMO Players

Read, enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

League of Legends is an MMO RPG/RTS inspired by the Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA). It also includes RPG elements in the form of a summoner character that gains levels, trains “abilities” called masteries, and gears up with runes.

Check out this review: League of Legends MMORPG/MMORTS

Let me know what you think of the review and/or the game.

I read a couple of really good blog posts recently that I highly recommend:

From Spinksville:  You cant heal stupidity!

and

From Bio Break: The Long, Hard Road to Console MMOs

and

From Elder Game: 2009: A year of Shitty MMOs.

For reference, you might find this post from Bio Break really useful: MMO Timeline. It includes dates of every major MMO’s release, expansions, and in some cases, cancellations.

Read them, enjoy, and feel free to share your comments there and/or here.

I recently published an interview with Andrew Cowan, founder and administrator of The Mud Connector.  If you are not familiar with TMC, it is one of the most important web sites in MUD/MMORPG history. It was the first major MUD search engine/community web site. It helped millions of gamers find an online home.

The Mud Connector – A Vital Resource in MUD and MMORPG History

You owe it to yourself to read the interview and learn a bit about this really important web site in online gaming history. And its not just a dinosaur – the site still gets about 100,000 unique visitors per month.

I just learned of this and it is sad news. Near Death Studios, the indie game company behind the resurrection of Meridian 59, closed down on December 31, 2009. One of the founders of Near Death Studios (Brian “Psychochild” Green) is a respected colleague and frequent reader of this blog. Brian announced the closing publicly on his blog.

I am (ok, almost) always sad when a gaming company closes its doors. It means people who passionately devoted their creative energies to something had to stop. Brian wrote that Meridian 59 will continue to operate, which is a good thing. But it is a shame that Near Death Studios will not be there to oversee it.

Best wishes in their next endeavors to Brian and others associated with Near Death Studios.

League of Legends is a game based on the Defense of the Ancients map for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. It is a competitive, player-vs-player, RTS-RPG-MMO hybrid.

This glossary defines some basic terms related to the game that can give you an idea about the game as well as help you get started. Knowing the lingo of a game is always very helpful.

League of Legends Glossary of Terms

As many readers here know, in addition to owning and running a gaming company, I am the Managing Editor of the MMO and Nintendo Wii channels at the technology web site Bright Hub. Bright Hub recently broke the top 1,000 barrier for busiest web sites on the internet, and as a result my article budgets have been steadily increasing.

To fill these opportunities, I am looking for some new writers who would like to write articles, reviews, analysis, guides, etc. about MMO or Nintendo Wii games.

The system is very flexible. You would get to research and pitch your own articles, and there is no minimum commitment. I have some writers who write 20+ articles per month, and some who write one article every few months.

Bright Hub pays an up front per article fee, and also gives the writer a significant share of the advertising revenue generated by their articles. The revenue share continues indefinitely. I’ve been with them for over a year, and it is a good system. This is an excellent opportunity to make some money writing about your favorite subject (games!) before the holidays.

If you are interested, send me an email at mhartman@editors.brighthub.com.

Thanks!

This is obviously not a healthy sign for Warhammer: Report: Layoffs Hit EA Studios Including Tiburon, Black Box, Redwood Shores, Mythic.

According to the report, Mythic lost 80 people or 40% of their staff.

EA had a recent investor conference call, and of course they avoided giving hard subscriber numbers for Warhammer. A 40% layoff pretty much tells the tale, however. I’d say this puts WAR well below 100k now, and my previous 6-12 month lifespan estimate is looking pretty good. I don’t see WAR lasting beyond Oct 2010.

I wish everyone luck who is parting ways from EA. There are a lot of great, smaller gaming companies out there, or you can even start your own. More talented people need to get away from this mega-behemoths and work on higher quality games from smaller, indie companies.

EDIT: More, potential insider details here. “Mythic laid off 80 people today, which is about 40% of the company and responsible for 90% of the content. According to a friend of mine who left before this happened, they’re putting Warhammer into “maintenance mode.”

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on the economic/business success.

TIME: How long does an MMO have to operate to be a success? This question came up when my wife and I were talking about a few teetering MMOs (Age of Conan, Warhammer, Champions Online) and a few MMOs that have already been shut down (The Sims Online, Auto Assault, Earth and Beyond, Matrix Online, Tabula Rasa.).  We both agreed upon 5 years.

MMOs take at least 2-3 years to develop, so 5 years is at least double the minimum development time. That seems fair. Some MMOs take a lot longer, but that is generally for reasons other than just the creation of the game (running out of money, small companies that have to shift resources to other projects, etc.). It takes about 5 years for a tv show to reach 100 episodes, and that is considered one of the key break points for whether a show is a true success (and is also really important for being sellable into syndication).

There’s something about 5 years. Its 1 more than it takes to go through college and high school. It is half a decade. I don’t have a purely numerical reason for this. 5 years just seemed right to us.

POPULATION: How many players/subscribers does an MMO need to be successful? On this issue I think it heavily depends. For a big budget, major publisher MMO, I think the baseline is 100,000. But more realistically, if you aren’t over 250,000 that’s pretty disappointing. I think 1 million is the mark for a blockbuster success. And I’ll also add this: if you make a niche title that monetizes itself well with a good business model, I think you can declare success at well under 100k players – even if you had a mega budget from a big publisher. Unfortunately, they might not agree.

For an indie developer, I think the number is much lower. Depending on the size of your staff, I think success comes at a couple thousand players. Through whatever business model you use, if you average $15 a month per player you only need 333 players per staff member to average $50k per year per staff member (assuming a salary range of $30-70k depending on experience.)  If your box sales cover your development and servers, that’s pretty darn good. With that math, a 10 person team only needs 4,000 players to do pretty well.

And that’s really all you need to be profitable in the long term – pay your staff, pay yourself, then save for the development of the next game.

Your opinions?

I read this signature file on an MMO forum today: “Remember, in MMO’s whoever achieved more than you is a nolifer, whoever achieved less than you is a noob.”

I chuckled at first, but it is sad how true that mentality is.

What do you think causes this?